The use of electronic communication continues to expand in all aspects of society. Online (e.g., over a network) audio and/or video interaction may occur within governmental entities, in the military, in professional conferencing and now even in personal interaction. In at least one example scenario, a user may wish to communicate with one or more other users over an online audio and/or video connection. The user may then configure a device (e.g., a client) to create a connection to the other users over a local-area network (LAN) and/or wide-area network (WAN) like the Internet. The clients may capture local sound/images/video and may also present sound/images/video captured from other users. At least one benefit of this interaction is that parties that are geographically distant can interact as if in the same location.
However, along with these benefits comes risk. It is often in the best interest of users participating in online communication to keep the information exchanged private, especially where the interaction may involve matters of national security, confidential business matters, sensitive private information, etc. Contrary to this objective, hackers having criminal and/or seemingly altruistic goals (e.g., “hacktivists”) may seek to intercept, record, alter, etc. online communication. A countermeasure employed to combat these efforts involves encrypting all information sent between clients so that only the clients containing appropriate private keys may decrypt the communication stream. While securing client-to-client communication may protect the content of the communication signal, the operations occurring locally on each client (e.g., audio and/or video processing, capture and/or presentation) are left unprotected. These operations are vulnerable to various malware that may be installed on the client device.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.